Heather Perry obituary

Heather Perry's radical solution to tiredness and headaches created headlines around the world

My friend Heather Perry, who has died suddenly aged 41, worked hard to fuse the counterculture of Burroughs and Bukowski with the late 1980s rave scene of which she was a part.

Brought up on a farm in the Golden Valley, Herefordshire, Heather began dealing in used cars in her teens, which gave her a lot of mobility and a hand-to-mouth income, and she became a familiar face at the outdoor parties across the west and southwest of England. After the "second summer of love" faded and was criminalised out of existence, she enrolled for a degree in communication studies at Sheffield Hallam University, indulging her love of Hunter S Thompson amid the lectures on structuralism and "popular narrative and ideology".

After graduation, Heather worked for temping agencies and took on thesis typing for a number of students, myself included, who felt her sharp tongue whenever our handwritten notes proved indecipherable. We became neighbours at Park Hill estate, Sheffield, where Heather treated the spaciousness and panoramic views as a place to work on several novels, all unfinished or unpublished. When her applications for funding towards a creative writing master's degree proved unsuccessful, she threw herself wholeheartedly into various business ventures, from jewellery-making to foreign exchange trading.

Over time, Heather's concerns about tiredness and headaches developed into a self-diagnosis of chronic fatigue syndrome. In 2000, her radical solution to this problem was to fly to the US for trepanation, a procedure she performed on herself under the scrutiny of a documentary camera crew and with, it was claimed, the FBI in hot pursuit, trying to prevent the creation of a hole in her skull. The incident created headlines around the world, providing a mixture of lurid copy and a topic on which anyone with internet access could offer an opinion.

Self-trepanation was the subject of two more of her unpublished works: a pamphlet arguing for its benefits and a memoir of the family and legal conflicts brought on by the episode. Heather remained a frequent interviewee for writers on alternative medicine and psychological issues, but she came to resent the often sensationalist coverage she attracted and being judged by strangers who let this single incident define their entire view of her.

In later years, Heather lobbied the press on behalf of the photographer Steve Sparkes, who sought recognition for first producing (in 1967) a monochrome poster of Che Guevara from the celebrated photograph taken by Alberto Korda and widely reproduced thereafter.